How Many Email Accounts Does One Need? – Plus a Word of Praise for Netvibes

Today I registered my fifth Gmail account. I am not greedy – I really need all of them. And I’ve got an additional one on GMX that costs me 2 Euros a month and allows me to send text messages/SMS and faxes to Germany.

I use the GMX-account for all things Amazon, Ebay, etc and for the job news letters for which I have subscribed. I am also using it for my “business liaisons”, yet am not quite happy with that. For one, I don’t really like GMX’s look and feel (they are working on an interface with an AJAX-appeal, but even that sucks), and also, this email address has a .de extension which occasionally leads to confusion in Austria, as GMX also offers .at accounts. So I might abandon it at one point.

Then I have got my cherished first Gmail account, which I try to use ONLY for human to human communication, featuring my real name. I don’t want any spam or dead line/business related mail to show up on that one.

This is why I’ve got ANOTHER Gmail account that I use exclusively for registrations on websites that force a registration upon you (e.g. to use their customer support). This one uses a made up name.

I’ve got a third account on Gmail which I use for all my blog related communication needs. It gives away my first name.

Then there is my fourth account which uses a silly name, something like “Getting out of here” that I first used when I was looking for jobs to get out of my previous jobs. I might abandon that one.

And today I finally signed up for my fifth gmail account, which is an inversion of my real name. In Austria, it is (oddly) common to introduce oneself using the last name first: “Hello, I am Smith Julia”. Email addressed are often created following the same logic: smith.julia@mail.com. Odd, but nobody here finds that bizarre.

This fifth email account I am going to put on a business card (just ordered 250 for free from vistaprint.at), so that arbitrary people to whom I’ve given my card can email me, but with my first choice account staying free from business affairs.

The only aspect potentially annoying about Gmail in that respect is that you log in and out of your Google account any time that you change the email acccount. Would be cool if they did something about that, e.g. allowed you to designate a primary account, but I doubt that is going to happen.

Google has become less user-oriented of late, which is particularly manifest in the way they are going about your privacy in Google reader: If you decide to share an item, it is going to be accessible to everyone and their dog who is in your address book. They call the people in your address book “your friends” – who can really have 400+ friends? And what’s next – sharing all your Google documents with your “friends”? that’d be he “Kill Google App”.

That’s why I unsubscribed from my Google reader feeds. I am now using netvibes which also has better microchunking options – they really manage to squeeze all my feeds onto one screen and still it doesn’t look cluttered. You can even export your Google reader feeds and then import them to netvibes. Check it out!

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Netvibes looks interesting… I may try it out. I’ve also recently installed a Firefox theme called ‘Littlefox’, which is designed for ‘optimal screen usage’. I.e. there is now more room for feeds (my favourite way of reading them is in Firefox) and overall it’s all a bit more economical with screen space.

I agree with your gmail – comment btw. – the interface should support multiple logins, e.g. each account on a different tab (they already use tabs in iGoogle, so I don’t see why they can’t offer it for gmail…)

Another good thing about netvibes is that it allows you to see the status of multiple email accounts in widgets. I now have a separate tab for email accounts, and in that I keep the email widgets. Am still tinkering with it – they have a fitted gmail widget and I think you can only use one account for that, but there are various pop widget which you can also use for gmail accounts. It doesn’t retrieve the messages, but tells you whether you have mail or not.

Hi netviber, are you sure? I can currently see new emails in two of my accounts – it has to be said though that I updated one of them manually. And updating five accounts on one page is still easier than logging in and out five times!

Update: I just tried again by sending an email simultaneously to two of my gmail accounts – and both netvibes widgets showed me new mail.